Some poets in the Stafford Challenge facebook group recently wrote pantoums, and I was inspired to write one. I haven't written one in quite a while (though until I recently retired from professoring, I always had my students in Elements of Creative Writing write them) and I see I'm a bit rusty. Anyway, here's today's pantoum. It's a narrative poem and so the pantoum repetition was tricky ... I cheated quite a bit.
I should explain that a pantoum is a poetic form borrowed from the Malay tradition, comprised of quatrains in which the second and fourth lines of a particular stanza reappear as the first and third lines of the next stanza. This repetition continues until the last stanza of the poem, in which the original first and third lines of the opening stanza (which haven't been repeated yet) appear in reverse order. So the first line of the poem becomes the last line of the poem. When I said "I cheated" above, I meant I sometimes didn't repeat the lines exactly, though I always kept some words, especially the last one.
Kid Crime Confession
One thing I feel most guilty about from childhood
in San Francisco, the Haight-Ashbury district,
happened when my best friend Pete and I were nine.
We were playing basketball at Grattan Playground
in the City, our sleepy Haight-Ashbury district,
when we got what we thought was a brilliant idea,
better than basketball. Near Grattan Playground
there was a high, grassy hill that ended in a cliff.
We didn’t consider the drawbacks of our brilliant idea:
there was a road that circled Tank Hill and we decided
to loft rocks at the cars passing by below the cliff.
We didn’t want to hit any cars, just scare grown-ups.
Unlike grown-ups we didn’t think when we decided
to start flinging those rocks off that cliff. After all
we didn’t want to hit any cars, just scare grown-ups.
Of course, it happened. Sudden screech of brakes.
We stopped flinging. Looked over the cliff. After all
those cars we missed, we had hit one, in the windshield!
The driver was climbing the cliff. We screeched, broke
away, running down the hill as fast as our legs could go.
We knew we were gonna get it. A broken windshield!
By the time the driver got to the top of that cliff,
all he saw was two kids running as fast as they could go,
by then over a block away, pretty much out of reach.
Thinking back, I feel awful for that driver on the cliff.
That windshield would have cost a fortune to replace,
our nine-year-old minds thought, a price way out of reach.
Pete and I never told anyone about that day, no friends,
certainly not our parents, who’d have had to replace
that shattered glass. A lot of other equally shattering
incidents happened later to me and Pete, to our friends.
But this one was our secret, until today, until this poem.
I wonder about that driver now, misfortune shattering
his day, a dumb thing Pete and I did when we were nine.
A guilt-ridden secret, long-held, until this poem:
the thing I feel most guilty about from childhood.
—Draft by Vince Gotera [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]
Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking.
Ingat, everyone. ヅ
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